Oleg Penkovsky
Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky ( ; born April 23, 1919 in Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia, Soviet Russia; died May 16, 1963 in the Soviet Union), codenamed HERO, was a colonel with Soviet military intelligence (GRU) during the late 1950s and early 1960s who informed the United Kingdom and the United States about the Soviet emplacement of missiles in Cuba. Biography Early life and military career Penkovsky's father died fighting as an officer in the White Army in the Russian Civil War. Penkovsky graduated from the Kiev Artillery Academy in the rank of lieutenant in 1939. After taking part in the Winter War against Finland and in World War II, he had reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel. A GRU officer, Penkovsky was appointed military attaché in Ankara, Turkey in 1955. He later worked at the Soviet Committee for Scientific Research. Penkovsky was a personal friend of GRU head Ivan Serov and Soviet marshal Sergei Varentsov.Oleg Gordievsky and Christopher Andrew (1990). KGB: The Inside Story. Hodder & Stoughton. ISBN 0-340-48561-2; cited from Russian edition of 1999, pages 476-479 Work for (or against) Western intelligence There are two very different opinions about Oleg Penkovsky. While the majority of observers seem to feel that he was a genuine defector as described in The Penkovsky Papers,Penkovskiy, Oleg, The Penkovskiy Papers, Doubleday & Co., New York, 1965 Peter Wright, a scientist with MI5 in Britain, was convinced that Penkovskiy was a Soviet plant designed to lead the United States to the conclusion that the USSR's intercontinental missile capabilities were much less developed than they actually were.Peter Wright, Spy Catcher. William Heinemann Publishers Australia, 1987 The defector account says Penkovsky approached American students on the Moskvoretsky Bridge in Moscow in July 1960 and gave them a package, which was delivered to the Central Intelligence Agency. CIA officers delayed in contacting him because they believed they were under constant surveillance.Schecter, Jerrold L.; Deriabin, Peter S. (1992), The Spy Who Saved the World: How a Soviet Colonel Changed the Course of the Cold War, Scribner, ISBN 0-684-19068-0 Penkovsky eventually persuaded the British spy Greville Wynne to arrange a meeting with two American and two British intelligence officers during a visit to London in 1961. Wynne became one of his couriers. In his autobiography, Wynne says that he was carefully developed by British intelligence over many years with the specific task of making contact with Penkovsky.Wynne, Greville, The Man from Moscow. Hutchinson & Co., London, 1967 The CIA regretted their earlier mistake, but were included by the British and they shared future information. For the following eighteen months, Penkovsky supplied a tremendous amount of information to his British Secret Intelligence Service handlers in Moscow, Ruari and Janet Chisholm, and to CIA and SIS contacts during his permitted trips abroad. Most significantly, he was responsible for arming President John F. Kennedy with the information that the Soviet nuclear arsenal was much smaller than previously thought, that the Soviet fueling systems were not fully operational, and that the Soviet guidance systems were not yet functional. The view of Peter Wright is quite different. Wright was struck by the fact that, unlike Igor Gouzenko and other earlier defectors, Penkovskiy did not reveal the names of any illegal Soviet agents in the West but confined himself to organizational detail, much of which was known already. Wright also noted that some of the documents were originals which in his opinion would not have been so easily taken from their sources. Wright is scathing in his condemnation of the leadership of British intelligence throughout nearly the whole Cold War period. He felt that the Soviet agents Philby, Maclean, Burgess and Blunt could all have been identified more quickly using the scientific methods that he proposed. In Wright's view, British intelligence leaders became even more paralyzed when Philby and the others defected to the Soviet Union. British intelligence became so fearful of another fiasco that they avoided taking risks. Aware of this sensitivity, Wright says, the Soviets planted Penkovsky to buoy up the sagging fortunes of their ineffective—and therefore highly useful—counterparts in British intelligence. Wright says, "When I first wrote my Penkovsky analysis Maurice Oldfield (later Chief of MI6 in the 1970s), who played a key role in the Penkovsky case as Chief of Station in Washington, told me: 'You've got a long row to hoe with this one, Peter, there's a lot of K's knighthoods and Gongs medals riding high on the back of Penkovsky,' he said, referring to the honors heaped on those involved in the Penkovsky operation."Spy Catcher, p. 212 Wright is far more complementary of the CIA and even of the FBI who were initially and remained suspicious about Penkovsky. Greville Wynne seems to have remained convinced that Penkovsky was genuine and that Wynne's own sacrifices, including 18 months in the Lubyanka Prison, were all worthwhile. Former KGB major-general Oleg KaluginKalugin, Oleg. The First Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West (St. Martin's Press, 1994). ISBN 0-312-11426-5. does not once mention Penkovskiy in his comprehensive book. KGB defector Vladimir Sakharov, suggests Penkovskiy was genuine, saying, "I knew about the ongoing KGB reorganization precipitated by Oleg Penkovsky's case and Yuri Nosenko's defection. The party was not satisfied with KGB performance... I knew many heads in the KGB had rolled again, as they had after Stalin."Sakharov, Vladimir. High Treason (Ballantine Books, 1980), p.177 While the weight of opinion seems to be Penkovskiy was genuine, the debate underscores the difficulty faced by all intelligence agenices of separating fact from fiction. Role in Cuban Missile Crisis Soviet leadership started the deployment of nuclear missiles in the belief that Washington would not detect the Cuban missile sites until it was too late to do anything about them. Penkovsky provided plans and descriptions of the nuclear rocket launch sites on Cuba. Only this information allowed the west to identify the missile sites from the low-resolution pictures provided by US U-2 spy planes. Former GRU Colonel and defector Viktor Suvorov writes, "And historians will remember with gratitude the name of the GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovsky. Thanks to his priceless information the Cuban crisis was not transformed into a last World War."Suvorov, Viktor. Soviet Military Intelligence. Grafton Books, London, 1986, p. 155 Penkovsky's activities were revealed by Jack Dunlap, a double-agent working for the KGB. The KGB swiftly drew the conclusion that there was a mole in their ranks and set about uncovering him. Penkovsky was arrested on 22 October 1962—before Kennedy's address to the nation revealing that U-2 spyplane photographs had confirmed intelligence reports and that the Soviets were installing medium-range nuclear missiles on the Caribbean island—code named Operation Anadyr. Thus President Kennedy was deprived of a potentially important intelligence agent that might have lessened the tension during the ensuing 13-day stand-off; intelligence such as the fact that Nikita Khrushchev was already looking for ways to defuse the situation.Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, "Khrushchev's Cold War", 2006. ISBN 978-0-393-05809-3 Such information, arguably, would have reduced the pressure on Kennedy to launch an invasion of the island—an action which, it is now known, may have led to the use of Luna class tactical nuclear weapons against US troops. The Soviet commander, General Issa A. Pliyev, commander in charge, had been given permission to use these weapons without consulting Moscow first.Vladislav Zubok & Constantine Pleshkov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War, 1996, page 264, Harvard Press, Massachusetts ISBN 0-674-45532-0 Penkovsky's fate Penkovsky is said to have been convicted of treason and espionage in a trial in 1963. Some sources allege Penkovsky was executed by the traditional Soviet method of a bullet to the back of the neck, cremated and his ashes buried in the New Donskoy Cemetery in Moscow. Former MI5 officer Peter Wright believed Penkovskiy was actually a double agent who, having completed his task of taking in the western intelligence services, was, after a show trial, awarded a suitable post out of sight in the Soviet Union. This, claims Wright, explains why Penkovsky never defected to the West when he had the chance. GRU agent Vladimir Rezun, known for his controversial books under the pseudonym Viktor Suvorov, following his defection from the Soviet Union to the United Kingdom, alleged in ''Aquarium'' to have been shown a black and white film in which a GRU colonel was bound to a stretcher and cremated alive in a furnace as a warning to potential traitorsSuvorov, Viktor. Aquarium (Grafton Books, London, 1987), p.11. and since Penkovsky is the only known executed GRU colonel, this description was attributed by many to his fate.http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/the-newer-meaning-treason A similar description of the process was later included in Ernest Volkman's popular bookErnest Volkman, "Spies: The Secret Agents Who Changed the Course of History". ISBN 978-0-471-02506-1 and Tom Clancy's novel Red Rabbit. Suvorov in interview later denied http://www.echo.msk.ru/programs/hrushev/655886-echo/ that the man in the film was Penkovsky. Portrayal in popular culture Penkovsky was portrayed by Christopher Rozycki in the 1985 BBC television serial Wynne and Penkovsky his spying career was the subject of Episode 1 of the 2007 BBC Television docudrama Nuclear Secrets, entitled The Spy from Moscow in which he was portrayed by Mark Bonnar. The programme featured original covert KGB footage showing Penkovsky photographing classified information and meeting with Janet Chisholm. It was broadcast on 15 January 2007. Penkovsky is also mentioned in three of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan books: The Hunt for Red October, The Cardinal of the Kremlin, and Red Rabbit. In the Jack Ryan universe, he is described as the agent who recruited Colonel Mikhail Filitov as a CIA agent (code-name CARDINAL), and in fact had urged Filitov to betray him in order to solidify his position as the West's top spy in the Soviet hierarchy. The "cremated alive" hypothesis also appears in several Clancy novels. Furthermore, Penkovsky's fate is also mentioned in the Nelson DeMille spy novel The Charm School. See also *George Kisevalter References }} Further reading * Oleg Penkovsky, The Penkovskiy Papers: The Russian Who Spied for the West, Doubleday, New York, 1966. :Note: The book was commissioned by the Central Intelligence Agency see . A 1976 Senate commission stated that "the book was prepared and written by witting agency assets who drew on actual case materials." See Author Frank Gibney denied that the CIA forged the provided source material, which was also the opinion of Robert Conquest. Other dismissed the book as propaganda and having no historic value. * Jerrold L. Schecter and Peter S. Deriabin, The Spy Who Saved the World: How a Soviet Colonel Changed the Course of the Cold War, New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992. ISBN 0-684-19068-0 * Robert Wallace and H. Keith Melton, with Henry R. Schlesinger, Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA's Spytechs, from Communism to al-Qaeda, New York, Dutton, 2008. ISBN 0-525-94980-1 * Frederick Forsyth, The Deceiver, Bantam Books, 1992 ISBN 0-553-29742-2, p. 43, 4th line. * Viktor Suvorov, Devil's Mother, Sofia, Fakel Express, 2011 ISBN 978-954-9772-76-0, in Bulgarian language. External links *Oleg Penkovsky, Spartacus Educational website by John Simkin * *The Capture and Execution of Colonel Penkovsky, 1963 *Oral History of Joseph J. Bulik, Penkovsky's CIA case officer Category:1919 births Category:1963 deaths Category:Soviet people executed for spying for the United States Category:British spies against the Soviet Union Category:GRU officers Category:Executed spies Category:People executed by single firearm cs:Oleg Peňkovskij de:Oleg Wladimirowitsch Penkowski et:Oleg Penkovski es:Oleg Penkovski fr:Oleg Penkovsky ko:올레그 펜콥스키 he:אולג פנקובסקי lt:Olegas Penkovskis ja:オレグ・ペンコフスキー pl:Oleg Pieńkowski ru:Пеньковский, Олег Владимирович sr:Олег Пенковски fi:Oleg Penkovski sv:Oleg Penkovskij tr:Oleg Penkovsky